One of the ones from the “Flip This House” show is actually on my street. No way in hell would I buy that piece of junk. You could tell even from the show that the remodel was crappy, they disrespected the character and period of the house, etc.
No, no, no! I actually live in a “flipped house” right now, and heavens to betsy am I glad we only rent it. I think it’s been remodeled/flipped at least twice (according to the long-ago former resident I talked to), and both times poorly.
“Improvements” made:
-Moving the water heater to uninsulated garage (great for the gas bills!)
-Adding a front and back deck (ugly and of the lowest quality wood known to man)
-Tiling the kitchen counters (I guess it was the granite of the late 80’s)
-Added two industrial style fluorescent lights to the kitchen
-Adding about 50 sq feet to the kitchen (resulting in a terribly bizarre layout/counter arrangement)
Improvements not made:
-Fixing the wiring (run the microwave and dim all the lights in the house)
-Updating the 1960’s era wall heaters (one breathes fire!)
-Adding even slightly insulated windows (during the “harsh” winter in CA, we pay $150/mo on heating bills for ~900 sq feet, although could be related to the heaters too)
-Mitigating the mold problem
-Fixing what I suspect may be a sagging foundation (at least one interior door won’t close)
But the house does have one of the biggest backyards in all of the neighborhood, so I shouldn’t complain too much! 
Did I mention that this is California, so this is at least a $450K house?
The architect of the house I grew up in actually designed it for another site (he came down with TB in the 1930s and was to retire to Arizona, but his wife refused to leave Iowa). The lot finally purchased necessitated the plans to be reversed into a mirror image of themselves.
So my house is in fact not flipped, but flopped. 
If it’s quality, the style is to our liking, and the price is right, why not?
But–those are three BIG ifs.
We sold our condo and bought a house last summer, and in house shopping, we saw a LOT of really bizarre remodels. Some of them were quality work but in a bizarre layout, some were very obviously cheap fixes that looked like a bigger pain to undo than the house we ended up buying will be to redo. We wound up with an 1800sf home that has original 1956 kitchen cabinets (ugly and a serious PITA) in a fantastic neighborhood that we bought as a bargain; it’s still holding its value fairly well in this craptacular market. Looking at houses certainly taught us what we DON’T want, in both style and workmanship.
Flipping. Are you talking about speculation?
Because, no offense, and it doesn’t sound like this is you anyway, but:
I think that housing speculation is wrong. I see everywhere around me the effects that speculation, gentrification, “urban renewal”, and the housing bubble have had on real actual human beings, most of whom are poor. Cities used to have a mix of houses and rental units that incorporated accomodations for a broad range of people – rich, poor, in the middle. Now, it’s as if people no longer have the right to live where they’ve lived all their lives, because somebody decided they could make their fortune “flipping” in an as-yet undiscovered neighborhood.
Round here, some asshat actually built a whole mess of very-high-end condos – directly across the street from the Oakland Sewage Treatment Plant!!!
A house in my suburb was flipped recently. Bought for $435k sold for $820k fifteen months later. $435k was upper limit for the suburb at the time and property prices have risen 14% in that time. Must have been some amazing reno, right? Nope. They upgraded the kitchen and two bathrooms, removed a raised platform in the lounge area and landscaped the already landscaped front garden. That’s it. Kitchen has (the ubiquitous) stainless steel appliances of very ordinary quality and of small size to boot. Same ordinary quality tapware and fittings throughout. Obvious things that could have been done, like using higher end appliances and putting a second shower head in the oversize en-suite shower weren’t done in order to save money. But more importantly, the rotting decking hasn’t been replaced, just repainted, a retaining wall in danger of collapse hasn’t been touched, what little storage space there was has been removed and the heating system heats half the house at once - either the left or right side not the upper or lower floors as is usual. Kudos to the flippers - it came as a surprise to me that there are people out there who not only will pay for cheap facelifts but will pay over the odds.
I warn you, stunning pics but it’s all superficial.
My FIL flips houses for a living right now, and he is awesome at it. I would definitely buy a flipped house, but better still, I’d buy the falling apart house and fix it up myself – much cheaper and gives me much more creative control.
From a buyer’s POV, it shouldn’t matter whether the house was upgraded by a speculator or by a previous owner. A buyer should look into the quality or lack of it regardless.
Things may be different in other parts of the country, but around here, there are excellent contractors who do marvelous renovations of otherwise near-worthless properties. Buying such a house might be a very good thing for everyone if the price is right.
Seems to me like there are four types of flips:
-Nice house in nice neighborhood + cosmetic “improvements”
-Crummy house in crummy neighborhood + cosmetic “improvements”
-Crummy house in nice neighborhood + cosmetic “improvements”
-Crummy house in nice neighborhood + fundamental improvements
Three of these only serve the interests of the person doing the flip - i.e. potentially making them money, although I’d argue that the first two are not very sound investment strategies. The last one serves the interests of the neighborhood, the people buying the house, and potentially the flipper, if done correctly.
I would consider buying that last house, but in the case of the other three, someone is just out to separate me from my money.
(And am I the only one, or does that house bathsheba linked to look like a church?)
Huzzah, brujaja! My thoughts exactly. Anyone who’s seen first hand the effect this type activity has had on the Bay Area can’t help but question the ethics of “flipping” in general.
My (English) MIL said, “Is that a house?”
If the flip is done to leave the house looking like a freaking operating theatre… no.
If the flip is done by someone whose sense of aesthetics makes me want to take a hammer to the bathroom, no.
The house I own had been improved by its owners. It wasn’t a “flip” done to make it more sellable, but the colors on the walls were very much my style (I do need to take a brush to the hallway when I get the time), the double glazed windows are an improvement in anybody’s book, the handfitted hardwood floor and the doors are great (the previous owner is a carpenter by training, although he works in a factory). Would I have bought it if the double-glazed windows had been a “for sale improvement” rather than a “we want to pay less electricity” improvement? Yep.
When my aunt and uncle tried to sell their San Sebastian flat without so much as a hand of paint, it was in the market for over a year and a half; for SS that’s close to the all-time record. Give it two hands of paint, covering those black scuff marks at toddler level and the nail holes in the walls; clean it thoroughly as opposed to “house with four males, three of them under age 5, and a woman who is not trying to keep her zoo reined in” clean; sell.
An overflipped house is bad. One where you can move in without waiting for the plumbers is good. Doing the bathroom or the kitchen right before selling the house is generally not a good idea, as this means you’ll need to find buyers who absolutely like them. A hand of paint, maybe upgraded windows if the old ones are in bad shape, renewed carpeting in places with such, a professional polish in places with tiles or hardwood; taking a look at any small appliances you’re leaving and changing them (don’t leave a microwave that’s chipped inside, d’oh): this is good.
My SiL despised IKEA without actually having ever been there. Then one day she came to visit me.
“Oh, nice sofa!” Local DIY store, it’s a futon. See, you pull here and then it can sleep two 
“I love the wooden dresser!” IKEA.
“Those are very stylish dishes, very modern.” IKEA.
“I love these glasses.” IKEA, they were candles and then I gasp burned them (SiL likes candles but doesn’t understand burning them).
“Oh, this chest of drawers you have in the living room… it matches the dresser, doesn’t it?” Yep. “So is it also from IKEA?”
The Nephew’s room is from IKEA, the huge sofa-bed-with-drawers-below is from IKEA, the leather couch they’re getting for their second home will be from IKEA, the colorful pillows they got when they moved to their current flat are from IKEA. SiL now says that if she’d bothered looked at IKEA stuff instead of just keeping it filed under “C for Cheap shit” for so long, she would have been able to furnish their first flat by half of what they spent.
I make a distinction between flipped and renovated. A flipped house is one that was quickly made over; I would be suspicious of the quality of the work and I think a lot of the improvements are kind of characterless and will be dated looking in a very short period. Renovated to me means that the previous owners tried to bring the house back and implies a certain level of care that a flipped house lacks. BTW, I can’t find the thread linked to in the OP, is it gone?
It does appear to have vanished. The pertinent part in it was the number of people saying, “I don’t like that improvement because it makes the house look like it had been flipped.” You see all of these house flipping shows on tv, so I figure there must be some market for them.
Add to that the number of people I’ve talked to recently about our ongoing rennovations who say they can’t even hammer a nail and wouldn’t buy a house that needed work.
No, you can safely assume I am the opposite of a speculator. My first house was a fixer-upper from a cosmetic standpoint. It had been owned by a little old lady and was dated in decor. So we painted and replaced flooring throughout. It also needed a new roof and furnace and we put in whole house air and redid the gutters over the course of seven years. It was a small starter house and good to cut our teeth on.
Our current white elephant is a 200yr old farmhouse. It will take me a minimum of 20 years to be done with rennovations, and I don’t plan on moving except to a nursing home. The seller admitted that some flippers considered it, but it needs too much work for a quick turn-over.